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The design studio/street art crew known as Truly Design is truly an expert at creating anamorphic art. The group is playful with both literal and figurative perspective. The Medusa anamorph, for example, does precisely this. According to the myth if a person looked directly at the serpant haired Gorgon they would instantly turn to stone. Perseus was only able to slay the monster by looking at her reflection. Similarly, this Medusa can only be seen from singular perspective.

Tomas Saraceno is a master of transforming a space and infusing it with an interactive surreal quality. His installations that are constructed to provide viewers with the experience that they are walking on a cloud are absolutely captivating. The soft dream-like magic of his work is more tactile and intimate, however, in this paper installation Cloud House featuring cloud like formations made only out of smaller geometric matte paper structures.

The artist collective Quiet Ensemble are skilled at making the mundane feel monumental, or at least worth noting. Their installation/ performance art Quintetto is naturally composed of a quintet of goldfish. The little fish may not realize it, but their movements are of consequence. Placed in tall tanks, the vertical movements of the fish are monitored and converted into sound. Each fish is assigned a separate tank. The installation seems to give some sort of order to the random, and in a strange way lend gravity to something that is trivial. Check out the video to see the fish in action in full performance art glory!

This giant snaking sculpture is the Funnel Tunnel by artist Patrick Renner. The temporary sculpture was commissioned by Art League Houston and sits on the esplanade across from their building. Renner’s Funnel Tunnel stretches for 180 feet, open as a giant funnel at one end and tapering to a sharp point at the other. The structure was created using steel and reclaimed wood. The ALH explains, “the sculpture reflects the creative people and businesses in the Montrose area, and is the first of its kind in Houston.” [via]

At Beautiful Decay we are beginning to bring our readers weekend coverage, where we’ll be sharing micro art trends of the unusual and unexpected every weekend. And we figured what better way to start than with dessert?

The work featured here of artists Peter Bugg, Rebecca Holland, William Lamson, Aude Moreau, Navid Nuur and Kara Tanaka demonstrates that diverse ways confection can become conceptual. From the painstaking process of Moreau’s Sugar Carpet (which uses 4,500 pounds of loose Domino sugar) to the haunting ephemerality of Tanaka’s Social Leveler (When Immortality Became Uncouth), the use of sugar as a medium, sometimes in combination with other materials, becomes an expansive tactile vehicle.

Artist Alan Bur Johnson natural motifs often. However, this may be his work at its most creepy. Johnson’s Progeny series begins with photographs of winged insects. The photographs are transferred to transparencies and affixed to the wall using insect pins. Progeny allows viewers to inspect the insects up close, afford creatures we’d otherwise dispose of more time, and give some thought to taxonomy, the exercise of classification. Interestingly his statement says in part:

“Whether an image, memory or specimen, each is meticulously dissected, altered and restructured. Referencing physical structures and the pulse of living cycles, his work documents fleeting occurrences, which typically transpire unnoticed.”

Artist Justen Ladda has been living and working in New York City since 1978. His first solo exhibit listed on his resume was in 1980 at the legendary ABC No Rio. His perspective warping style looks surprisingly fresh considering much of it was created throughout the 1980’s. Ladda combines painting with installation to create two-dimensional images that appear to float in space are slip into three dimensions. Using careful proportions, perspectives, and viewpoints, Ladda painstakingly creates image that appear severely warped from all but one angle. He often uses this technique of illusion to arrange for his paintings to interact with their surroundings in ways not often accorded to flat images.

The installation 24 HRS in Photos by Erik Kessels isn’t a typical photography installation. An entire room at San Francisco’s Pier 24 Photography is filled with photographs. One end of the room is piled to the ceiling with images cascading down to visitors’ feet. The photographs at first appear to be innocuous: family photos, vacation photos, smart phone photos. The immense number of photographs compiled by Kessels, though, are all of the images uploaded to the popular site Flickr in a single day. Kessels’ installation serves as a clue to astronomical number of images uploaded to the internet constantly. Even more striking is the way 24 HRS in Photos hints at the sheer saturation of images in day to day life. Kessels’ installation is part of A Sense of Place, a photography group exhibit on view at Pier 24 Photography through May 2014.